Health care providers, such as hospitals, utilize a pharmacist or pharmacy department within the hospital to coordinate the dispensing of drugs to patients of the health care institution. The pharmacists in such health care institutions are often burdened with the increasingly complex record keeping and inventory management that results from hospitals caring for hundreds, if not thousands, of patients every day.
The pharmacist's responsibility includes, among other things, filling individual patient prescriptions on a daily basis; maintaining sufficient inventory of each drug in order to have enough quantities of the drug in hospital stock to administer to patients on a daily basis; tracking of drug interactions to prevent a patient from being given a drug that has adverse affects when combined with other drugs; accounting for the purchase of drugs for use in the hospital; accounting associated with the giving of drugs to individual patients; distributing the drugs to the appropriate nursing stations within the hospital to suit each station's daily demands; tracking of drug expiration dates to rid inventories of expired drugs; and tracking of drug lot numbers, for example, in the event of a recall of a particular drug or drug lot number.
Health care providers, such as hospitals, often purchase drugs from drug distributors in bulk quantities (e.g., 100 single dose units of a particular drug). Health care supplies may be purchased in a similar fashion and the scope of the present disclosure is meant to include health care supplies, as well as drugs. While hospitals often purchase drugs in bulk due to manufacturer availability, drugs are nevertheless dispensed at the health care institution on a patient-by-patient basis in low dose quantities.
Some health care facilities include automated drug dispensing machines. These machines are often located at the point of use, such as at a caregiver's station in a patient unit. These machines are managed by caregivers in the pharmacy, who gather medications in the pharmacy, manually transport these medications to the machine, and manually load the machines. The machines have no specific knowledge of the medications and do not track lot numbers or expiration dates. Each medication dose must be manually inspected to determine if it has expired. In addition, any drugs that are removed from these machines and returned to the pharmacy must be manually inspected and loaded into the appropriate storage location in the pharmacy.